Cee’s challenge for the week calls for Man-made items. Go here to see more.

It was snowing real hard by the time we got out of the clinic of the aesthetician yesterday. Up next in my calendar is to pick up some food ordered from our friend Cocoy. From home she sells her homemade specialties – beef empanada and rice bibingka or rice cakes. This is different from the Vigan bibingka I made for New Year. In fact this is the other rice cake I wrote about.

Bibingkang kanin

Beef empanada

Cocoy is an excellent cook. She makes these snack foods from scratch by hand. The empanada crust is very delicate and soft, too tender that I wish it has more body, firmer to the bite but crumbles when you bite. It is delicious and filling nonetheless.

The rice cake requires rice grains to be soaked in water overnight and then ground in a food processor the next day. In the old fashion way, the cake is cooked in a clay pan with charcoal underneath and the top of the pan is covered with tin with more charcoal on top. It mimics the heat of an oven and since oven didn’t use to be fairly common in the province, this is the makeshift mechanism. Nowadays, there is a cooking system they came up with that is purely dedicated to cooking this rice cake.

While in their beautiful home, Cocoy showed me some of the religious images she has at home which are definitely handmade. One is our Lady of Penafrancia, a replica image of the Virgin Mary as a patron saint of a town in the Bicol Province in the Philippines.